Fuji FinePix F10

In the realm of digital photography, it seems that behind all promising new technology lies a trade-off. Such is the case with Fuji's Real Photo Technology, which is built into the new 6.3-megapixel FinePix F10 digital camera. Fuji claims that the algorithm included in the F10 lets you shoot in low-light situations, such as candlelight or night scenes, without a flash, yet avoid blurred photographs. Too good to be true, right?

The answer is a qualified "yes." Unfortunately, Fuji had to make some compromising tweaks to the camera to accommodate the new technology. Fuji boosted the ISO setting so that when light starts fading and a normal camera would lower the shutter speed from, say, 1/125 to 1/60 or 1/30, the F10 instead keeps the shutter speed at around 1/125 and increases the ISO from 80 to 400, 800, or even 1600. It's a great idea, but as we said, there are trade-offs. Though the F10 did take such shots clearly in our real-world tests, what you give up is the clear, low-noise pictures associated with images at ISO 50, 80, and 100. Fuji claims its images don't suffer from the increase in noise expected at ISO 800 and 1600. Though we found a bit less than usual, we didn't completely concur.

The somewhat bulky (for an ultracompact) camera has a Fujinon 3X optical, f/2.8 to f/5 zoom lens that zooms from 8 mm to 24 mm, or a 35-mm equivalent range of 36 mm to 108 mm. It lacks an optical viewfinder but has a large, 2.5-inch LCD that can be made brighter with the push of a button. Most often, it works well, even in bright light.

The FinePix F10 uses the very tiny xD media cards, as do most Fuji cameras. According to the company, the F10's battery life is approximately 500 shots per charge. It also features five scene modes, an auto mode, and a manual mode, though there are no true manual settings that can be accessed in the manual mode. We would have liked that option. Our review unit also had numerous technical problems with the content and structure of the menus—little things like typos and odd terminology—though Fuji says a downloadable firmware update will address these issues.

In our daylight test shot, we found a lot of noise, especially in the darker regions of our still-life model, but there was very good color saturation and color matching. We did notice some purple fringing on the color chart and in parts of our test images. There was good dynamic range, though, with excellent renderings of whites and blacks, and there was good contrast without too much loss of detail. The flash, however, tended to blow out some details. Because the camera automatically boosts the ISO up to 800 to compensate for low light, the low-light test image included quite a bit of noise. The colors were just a tad muddy in the flash shot but had good color matching.

In our real-world test shots, our main concern was how quickly the F10 boosted the ISO, which led to too much observable noise. The company's reasoning is that the quick boosting limits instances of blur. Though the images were sharper, we don't think that sacrificing clean images for sharpness is a good trade-off. We also found that in many shots, even some outdoors, we again saw too much noise, along with increases in purple fringing.

We rated the F10 as having 1,550 average lines of resolution, which is good for a 6.3MP camera. Shutter-lag time was acceptable, and boot-up time was a modest 2.7 seconds. The 4-second recycle time is rather poor for an ultracompact.

In testing the camera's video capabilities, which let you shoot 640-by-480 movies at 30 frames per second, we found pleasing but not stunning video clips. We were also disappointed by the lack of a zoom option.

If you're looking for a sleek, multipurpose ultracompact, we suggest going with our Editors' Choice, the Canon PowerShot SD500 Digital Elph, which gives you more megapixels, higher resolution, better picture quality, and also beats the F10's recycle time.

Compare the Fuji FinePix F10 and the Canon PowerShot SD500 Digital Elph side by side in our comparison table and benchmark test results.